Marketing Leaders Can’t Prove Their Value

Only 52 percent of chief marketing officers and other senior marketing leaders said they were successful in proving their value and receiving credit for helping meet enterprise objectives, according to a survey by Gartner.

CMOs ranked chief financial officers (40 percent) and CEOs (39 percent) as the top executives most skeptical of marketing’s value at their companies.

“One of the significant challenges in proving marketing’s value is dealing with entrenched beliefs and lack of understanding and alignment,” says Joseph Enever, senior director analyst in the Gartner Marketing practice, who cited earlier Gartner research that found 47 percent of CMOs said marketing is viewed as an expense rather than a strategic investment. CMOs, he says, need to provide persistent education and communication “to reshape these outdated perceptions and highlight marketing’s critical impact on the bottom line.”

CMOs and other senior marketing leaders who communicate marketing’s value through a long-term, holistic view have greater success in proving value and getting credit for it. Of the 41 percent of leaders who used this approach, more than two-thirds could prove marketing’s value and get credit for business contributions.

“Taking a wider perspective of value can mean measuring marketing’s effect across other functions, such as sales, customer experience, and operations,” Enever says. “Leaders must be disciplined in aligning success measures to different stakeholders, teams, and goals as they widen the aperture of their marketing value story.”

Gartner experts highlight the following three metric types that will help provide a deeper or more complete understanding of marketing’s value story:

• Relationship metrics, such as customer lifetime value and customer acquisition cost.
• Transactional metrics, such as cost per acquisition, return on ad spend, and return on investment.
• Operational metrics, such as stakeholder satisfaction with deliverables, productivity of marketing resources, and the percentage of expected capacity utilization.

“Leaders can get more bang for their buck by leveraging more complex metrics to communicate value,” Enever says. “CMOs and other senior marketing leaders who incorporated two or more of these high-complexity metric types were up to 1.8 times more likely to prove value and get credit than those who used none of them, and 1.4 times more likely than those who incorporated just one of them.”

The survey also revealed that personal involvement in data and analytics initiatives has a significant impact on CMOs’ ability to prove marketing value and get credit. Respondents who were involved in more activities in their current role, like creating marketing dashboards or developing measurement strategies, were 1.4 times more likely to prove value and get credit than those who conducted fewer activities. Of senior marketing leaders who meet regularly with the highest-ranking marketing analytics leaders and their team members, 62 percent said they can prove value and get credit, compared to just 30 percent who meet infrequently with both.

The research also found that three of the biggest barriers to proving marketing’s value are talent-related. They include lack of necessary soft skills/competencies, lack of analytical talent to analyze data and generate insight, and lack of talent to integrate and analyze data.

“CMOs must address these talent-related barriers to successfully prove marketing value and secure the recognition and investment it deserves,” Enever says. “By enhancing soft skills, bridging the analytical talent gap, and strengthening technical expertise, CMOs can transform the marketing function into a powerhouse of strategic insights and impactful storytelling.”